


Grave Goods

by pallidiflora



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 04:52:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/486923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallidiflora/pseuds/pallidiflora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Family, and relics, and power.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grave Goods

They began construction on his father's tomb when he was four. This is what Siamun has told him, at least, as he doesn't remember the specifics, only pictures frozen in time like friezes: traveling to Set Maat to watch the craftsmen work, playing with a wooden boat in miniature meant as a burial object, his father holding his hand.

His father let him have the boat as a toy later, and he pretended to run it and its tiny carved people aground; he remembers, too, his uncle watching him, shadowed against the sun.

"Would that I had a son to spoil so," he had said, and turned away.

 

* * *

 

At twelve Atem returns to Set Maat, when his father is bedridden: veined, gaunt, diminished ("like a date," he had overheard Seto saying, which earned him a slap across the mouth); this time Seto accompanies him, and along with Akhenaden they watch as the craftsmen bring out the gold funerary mask made in his father's likeness, poured a week prior, waiting to be inlaid with faience.

He recognizes nothing of his father in it; it looks sedate, self-satisfied almost, its expression closed, revealing nothing. The features are those of a god, perfect but remote.

"It will be magnificent," Akhenaden says. His eye is on Seto though, whose face is dark in the shadow of a tree.

 

* * *

 

When he is thirteen he watches the priests lower his father's body into his coffins. First there is gilded wood, then solid gold, and at last the impersonal carved oblong of his sarcophagus.

Priestess Isis, still only a girl, keens quietly behind him, her voice thin. Mahado is behind him too, not touching him but radiating body heat. In front of him his uncle is reading from the Book of the Dead, his voice measured, throbbing low, wasp-like.

"May I receive the bow of the Boat of Evening and the stern of the Boat of Morning," he is saying. Beside him, Seto, with his freshly-instilled piety, is watching Atem over his shoulder with appraisal; there is something almost like faint adulation in the angle of his chin, the heaviness of his eyelids. Atem is Horus now, of course: god of the sun and war, vanquisher of Set; raw destruction.

He is power incarnate, and what is not to admire?

"All the evil which was on me has been removed," Akhenaden says with gravity, and Seto turns his face away.

 

* * *

 

At fourteen he is coronated. He is given a crook and flail, just like the ones his father was buried with, and a blank cartouche on a chain; "so no one can have power over your name," Akhenaden had said, placing it around his neck.

Now Seto bows before his throne, and Akhenaden soon follows.

**Author's Note:**

> Set Maat is the Egyptian name for Deir el-Medina, a village of craftspeople who oversaw tomb construction in the Valley of the Kings; it's mentioned briefly by the latter name in the manga.


End file.
